Shoveling It In

Museum's Home May Not Be Very Fancy, But Patrons Really Dig It

March 31, 1996|By Judith Gaines, Boston Globe.

EASTON, Mass. — Shoveling "is as elementary as mud," laments author and shovel scientist Frederick W. Taylor. "So low a position in the scale of human labor does it occupy that it is considered unworthy of THOUGHT."

So begins a pamphlet on shoveling to be found among hundreds of other artifacts in the nation's only Shovel Museum.

Despite the massive use of these yeoman-like tools by New Englanders digging out from several recent winter storms, the shovel remains largely ill-considered and unsung. Mostly, it is viewed as an object for labor and loathing.

But in Easton, locals know differently: this, after all, is Shovel Town.

The museum's setting isn't fancy. Down a jerry-built staircase in an old elevator shaft, the museum occupies the basement of Donahue Hall at Stonehill College. But here shovels sit on pedestals, line walls and hallways, fill glass cases--and are immortalized.

Curator Louise Kenneally said there are 784 shovels in the basement, plus 19 more silver-plated shovels upstairs in a room adjacent to a small chapel, "a kind of sacristy for the shovels," she observed.

No two shovels are alike. There are square shovels, round shovels, shovels shaped like hearts and shovels shaped like tongues, some deep, some flat, some light and maneuverable, others heavy as barbells.

There's a "dandelion spade" with a long narrow blade, a "potato scoop" slotted to help separate spuds from the earth that sometimes clings to them, coffee bean shovels, cotton shovels, and a "crested four-star snow pusher" with a curled blade.

The museum houses the collection of the Ames Shovel Co., which was founded in 1803 in North Easton by Oliver Ames, entrepreneur. In the 1770s, his father, Capt. John Ames, a blacksmith in West Bridgewater, had fashioned some of the first metal-blade shovels in colonial America, using bog iron. (Until that time, Kenneally said, American shovels were made of wood; colonists seeking stronger, more durable shovels had to buy metal ones from England.)

Oliver improved his father's designs and built a factory where he and his sons mass-produced millions of shovels. By 1879, according to Kenneally, the company was making three-fifths of all the spades, scoops and shovels in the world.

The company still makes shovels, as well as garden tools and lawn furniture, although its headquarters has shifted to Parkersburg, W.Va., said Bill Ames, a Boston investor and descendant of "Old Oliver," as he was known.

Stonehill College, situated on the estate of Frederick Lothrop Ames, another of Oliver's descendants, acquired the shovel collection in 1973.

But the museum, which also contains 1,500 linear feet of company documents and Ames family correspondence, does not boast many visitors. Last year, a mere 200 people saw the collection, most of them students from Easton's Oliver Ames High School, as well as a few researchers interested in the development of U.S. technology, labor relations, local history, and related shovel subjects. Admission is free, by appointment only.

Hazel Varella, chairman of the high school's social studies department, said students are "really amazed" at how extensive the collection is, and pleased to learn how important the shovel has been in the development of the nation and their community.

In fact, said Varella, the high school sports teams once were known as "Shoveltowners," and to this day the senior class, as its last act before graduation, transfers power to the junior class "by handing over a symbolic shovel."

Greg Galer, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doing dissertation research at the museum, notes that such shovels dug the Erie Canal, turned spadefuls of earth for the nation's first transcontinental railroad, opened roads and highways into the frontier, and were so much in demand during the Gold Rush that they were used as "a medium of exchange between gold miners, like money."

The museum sat empty during the most recent snowstorm. Kenneally couldn't get there from her home in Brockton to open it, in part because she "couldn't get anyone to shovel me out." She admits she doesn't own an Ames shovel, and usually hires someone to do her shoveling.

Bill Ames himself, asked if he used an Ames shovel to dig out from the snowfall, replied, "If I didn't, I wouldn't tell you."